Dylan Scott How America became a nation of gamblers — and what might happen next The stigma is gone. Gambling — once a vice relegated to black and gray markets — has gone completely legitimate....
Dylan Scott
How America became a nation of gamblers — and what might happen next
Americans can now gamble on anything, anytime, anywhere.
Most of us carry a mini-casino around in our pocket. Want to bet on tonight’s NFL game? There’s an app for that. You don’t need a casino to play poker, but if you want the feel of felt and plastic chips on your fingers, one is likely nearby. If you’d rather put your money on a presidential election, the proliferation of online prediction markets means you can. Surveys indicate upward of 70 percent of US residents participated in some kind of gambling — whether the lottery or a raffle or blackjack or a sports wager — within the past year.
Gambling is sanctioned by the government. It’s endorsed by cultural institutions like the NFL. It’s becoming an inextricable part of sports fandom: ESPN, the flagship sports television network, licensed its own brand to a sportsbook last month.
The stigma is gone. Gambling — once a vice relegated to black and gray markets — has gone completely legitimate.
A few decades ago, all this would have been unthinkable. The first state to establish a lottery was New Hampshire in 1964. Until the 1980s, there were really only two places in the country where you could walk into a physical, legal casino and place bets: Nevada and Atlantic City, New Jersey. Professional sports leagues wouldn’t even put a team in Las Vegas, fearing mere proximity to the nation’s gambling capital.
The US now has roughly 1,000 casinos across the country, at least one in almost every state. And after the Supreme Court gave its blessing to sports betting in a 2018 decision, more than 30 states have approved plans to establish a legal sports gambling sector. The kickoff to the NFL season tonight is also the kickoff to what will likely be the biggest sports gambling season ever: 2022 set a new record for commercial gaming with $60 billion in revenue, beating the previous high from the year before. This year will likely exceed it.
Nevada was the first state in what would become a pattern: Gambling is a terrible get-rich-quick scheme for individuals, but a much better one for states.
In the United States, the religious movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries succeeded in outlawing most gambling in most places. But gambling persisted, on the frontier, in certain cities (such as New Orleans) and venues (riverboats), and in the black market. And as the American economy reeled from the Great Depression, legislators began considering the economic upside of enabling vices.
Nevada, a desert state with little in the way of a natural economy, turned to gambling to raise revenue in 1931 — and birthed the nation’s gaming capital.
The law
The 1950s law that created the modern regime for regulating gaming in the state begins with a declaration that the “gaming industry is vitally important to the economy of the State and the general welfare of the inhabitants.”
“It’s not that the welfare of the inhabitants is important and the gaming industry should serve it. The gaming industry is what’s important,” said David Schwartz, a UNLV professor and the author of Roll the Bones, a book on the history of gambling in the US. “There’s nothing in here about consumer protection at all.”
Reservation casinos
Supreme Court ruled in the late 1980s that American Indian reservations should be permitted to open casinos if they wished given their sovereignty, opening another much-needed line of revenue for a jurisdiction in desperate need of it. (All tribal gaming revenue totaled $39 billion in 2021, yet another gambling revenue record.)
States raked in about $35 billion combined in gambling-related revenue in 2021, a new high, most of it from their cut of public lotteries and casino income, according to the Urban Institute.
Sports betting
Sports gambling took the longest to reach the masses, but grew the fastest. As late as 1992, Congress had passed a law to ban most sports betting.
Then, in 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that, if a local jurisdiction authorizes it, people should be allowed to make bets on money lines, overs-and-unders, and all of the prop bets that a sportsbook staff could imagine.
Today, every time you turn on an NFL game or listen to an NFL podcast, you are bombarded by advertisements for the many opportunities that now exist for you to put your money on the line.
Over the course of a century, America transformed from a country trying to outlaw gambling as much as possible to one invested in its success.
Gambling problem
Not everybody who gambles develops a problem. But a percentage of casual gamblers will begin to display risky or problematic behaviors. Problem gambling exists on a spectrum, but, as a rule, if betting is affecting a person’s finances, work, and their relationships or creating legal problems, then they are generally considered to have a gambling problem.
Surveys commissioned by the National Council on Problem Gambling detected that the number of people who said they sought financial help due to gambling, as did the percentage of people who said they lied to others about their gambling. There was a similar increase in the share of gamblers who felt irritable when they tried to cut back or quit.
At-risk groups
Volberg and her team identified particular risk to certain groups: people already in gambling recovery, women, and adolescents. Arthur Flatto, whose work at the nonprofit Kindbridge Behavioral Health focuses on preventing gambling problems in kids, said omnipresent ads and gateway smartphone gaming (such as apps in which players purchase coins to move up a level) are reasons to worry about young people’s exposure.
Research has expanded the view of who is at risk for problem gambling: once believed to primarily affect relatively affluent white men, the disorder also affects women and people of color, and young people.
He also said the isolating experience of the pandemic had contributed to the increase in online gambling activity, a point made by several of the experts I spoke to and one that fits the available evidence.
Smartphones have also streamlined stock trading, giving rise to a new class of financial speculators, the crypto and meme stock crowds, whose behavior can sometimes resemble that of a gambler with a problem.
“With gambling, you can hide it. That was something early on that was really stunning to me,” Lia Nower, director of the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers University, said. “With online gambling, that’s true one thousand-fold. You can hide it until they come for your house, your car, and you have devastated your family financially.”
The economic benefits, meanwhile, are modest and the most deleterious effects tend to be concentrated among the poorer income groups
After decades of growing income inequality, perhaps we as a people have been conditioned to see Lady Luck as the path to the top.
“It’s not surprising to me that we’re increasing access to gambling options when we’re decreasing other avenues to economic success,” Rugle said. “The solution is gambling. Leave it to chance.”
But the country may not be prepared for the consequences. It’s hard to measure how many casual gamblers will go on to gamble too much.
Other countries that have had widespread legal gambling for much longer than the US, such as the United Kingdom, have seen some of those fears realized: As many as 36,000 British children are estimated to be problem gamblers and 8 percent of suicides have been attributed at least in part to gambling problems, according to Bloomberg.
Research and treatment
While there are federal agencies devoted to drug and alcohol abuse and related research, there is no federal institute for problem gambling research.
Public investments in treating problem gambling, meanwhile, are paltry even in comparison to treatment for alcohol and drug abuse. The US spends about $1 per capita on treatment for problem gambling for every $320 it spends on substance abuse treatment, Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, told me. And few would dispute that substance abuse treatment is woefully underfunded.
But what motive do states have to try to help people stop gambling? For them, the growing legitimacy of gambling has been lucrative. For public lotteries, they are the house. When they approve sports gambling and casinos, they get a piece of the action. The more people bet, the more the states and federal government stand to gain.
Governments have an obligation to balance the right of individuals to do what they please with their money with the responsibility to mitigate the associated harms. The US has embraced the former but neglected the latter, and there is little financial incentive to change.
When it comes to legalized gambling, I always wonder how much more money is flowing through the system compared to black market gambling. When it’s legalized, you can keep track of the...
When it comes to legalized gambling, I always wonder how much more money is flowing through the system compared to black market gambling. When it’s legalized, you can keep track of the transactions that are happening, but with black markets you can’t. Though ease of access does mean more gamblers, do safety measures, if there are any, prevent people from burning through cash faster than in a rule-free black market system?
It also seems hard to come to the conclusion that legalizing gambling causes an influx of gambling problems. There are more gamblers now, but how do you balance increased taxable gambling and the benefits it provides with the outcome of gambling addiction. It would make sense to me that with more taxes comes more publically funded sources of addiction help which theoretically makes it easier for addicts compared to a black market only gambling system.
Where I live there are numerous ad campaigns, help lines, etc. targeted at gambling addiction. So that's definitely something that wouldn't exist if it was an illegal activity although it's also...
Though ease of access does mean more gamblers, do safety measures, if there are any, prevents people from burning through cash faster than in a rule-free black market system?
Where I live there are numerous ad campaigns, help lines, etc. targeted at gambling addiction. So that's definitely something that wouldn't exist if it was an illegal activity although it's also probably (a lot) more popular. I think the biggest benefit to legalized gambling and lotteries, at least where I live, is that it's a huge tax windfall. Which definitely has an exploitative feeling to it as well, so I can see the arguments against it. I do have an issue with this quote in the article though:
As for the tax revenue created by legalized gambling, there has been little evidence that it results in a pronounced increase in, for example, education funding (often the recipient of state lottery income). Instead, Walker said, lawmakers have either directed dollars previously earmarked for public education elsewhere or cut that money out of the budget entirely.
If total tax revenue is increasing, it doesn't really matter how the budget is rearranged. You're getting the same services for less traditional tax income.
I think the biggest issue with the popularity of gambling is that it's so easy now. Anyone can basically have a slot machine in their pocket. I'm no puritan, I enjoy gambling once in a blue moon but it's very deliberate; going to the casino or horse track and placing some bets is a fun, social activity with somewhat of a physical barrier relative to placing a bunch of bets on your phone.
And as a casual sports enjoyer, it's really pushed me away from watching as much as I used to. Like I said, I don't mind gambling but when the tail starts wagging the dog the whole spectacle starts to cheapen itself.
Dylan Scott
How America became a nation of gamblers — and what might happen next
The stigma is gone. Gambling — once a vice relegated to black and gray markets — has gone completely legitimate.
Nevada was the first state in what would become a pattern: Gambling is a terrible get-rich-quick scheme for individuals, but a much better one for states.
The law
Reservation casinos
Sports betting
Gambling problem
At-risk groups
“It’s not surprising to me that we’re increasing access to gambling options when we’re decreasing other avenues to economic success,” Rugle said. “The solution is gambling. Leave it to chance.”
Research and treatment
Governments have an obligation to balance the right of individuals to do what they please with their money with the responsibility to mitigate the associated harms. The US has embraced the former but neglected the latter, and there is little financial incentive to change.
When it comes to legalized gambling, I always wonder how much more money is flowing through the system compared to black market gambling. When it’s legalized, you can keep track of the transactions that are happening, but with black markets you can’t. Though ease of access does mean more gamblers, do safety measures, if there are any, prevent people from burning through cash faster than in a rule-free black market system?
It also seems hard to come to the conclusion that legalizing gambling causes an influx of gambling problems. There are more gamblers now, but how do you balance increased taxable gambling and the benefits it provides with the outcome of gambling addiction. It would make sense to me that with more taxes comes more publically funded sources of addiction help which theoretically makes it easier for addicts compared to a black market only gambling system.
Where I live there are numerous ad campaigns, help lines, etc. targeted at gambling addiction. So that's definitely something that wouldn't exist if it was an illegal activity although it's also probably (a lot) more popular. I think the biggest benefit to legalized gambling and lotteries, at least where I live, is that it's a huge tax windfall. Which definitely has an exploitative feeling to it as well, so I can see the arguments against it. I do have an issue with this quote in the article though:
If total tax revenue is increasing, it doesn't really matter how the budget is rearranged. You're getting the same services for less traditional tax income.
I think the biggest issue with the popularity of gambling is that it's so easy now. Anyone can basically have a slot machine in their pocket. I'm no puritan, I enjoy gambling once in a blue moon but it's very deliberate; going to the casino or horse track and placing some bets is a fun, social activity with somewhat of a physical barrier relative to placing a bunch of bets on your phone.
And as a casual sports enjoyer, it's really pushed me away from watching as much as I used to. Like I said, I don't mind gambling but when the tail starts wagging the dog the whole spectacle starts to cheapen itself.